


The Answer Hidden, And The Call

by gogollescent



Category: Gunnerkrigg Court
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-02-04 19:19:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1790278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It’s Coyote!" Annie said, all frank astonishment. "Kat, did you learn to sculpt <em>dark chocolate</em>?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Answer Hidden, And The Call

Kat grew the musculature on an openwork plastic scaffold, not bothering to ape any known canid’s skeletal layout beforehand. Coyote _had_ bones, of course, in the same way normal people had hobbies; most of the time he forgot about them, and when he remembered he shoved them overbearingly into everyone’s faces to cover the lapse. Kat only wanted to capture his flexibility and his strength. She didn’t think she needed to pay lip service to whatever he had been, before humans like her came along and puffed him up. Perhaps because of this admittedly impressionistic approach, the first time she showed Annie the project Annie thought it was a giant jello sculpture.

"Oh, Kat!" she said, clapping her hands. "It’s wonderful that you’re branching out into the arts."

Paz, meanwhile, asked if she’d planned an improved birdcage. Kat decided not to correct either of them until Roboyote was further along in its development, and hoped they wouldn’t compare notes.

She had to wonder how Coyote would react to being mistaken for a cold dessert. Wasn’t Annie supposed to be his favorite? The girl who could see right through his flashy, changing stories? Maybe he’d made himself a little _too_ transparent to her, and when Annie looked at the real thing, she also saw a pudding mould.

The cage, though. That one, Kat didn’t think he’d mind.

She kept working. What had been unutterably difficult for the wing proved intuitive for forelimbs and sleek haunches; Kat thought guiltily that she should have begun closer to home, and not aspired on her very first try toward robotic flight. If all went well, the mock Coyote would be able to leap such great distances, and survive such bad falls, that it would, like Superman, be functionally indistinguishable from the average pigeon; and just now it was more important that they have a machine capable of going down than up. _Jeanne on the shore of the river, with an arrow through her spine…_

It was funny. Kat would probably have disliked Jeanne, if it hadn’t been for the specter of Diego. She didn’t like anyone who hurt her friends. But then, she reasoned, Jeanne wouldn’t have been down there but for Diego; wouldn’t have cut Annie, wouldn’t have grabbed onto Parley’s heart. It was one thing to excuse a person’s meanness because they had suffered; it was another thing if the suffering was all they still were. Sometimes before she went to sleep, Kat’s brain would, unconsulted, dredge up the slideshow and the voices; dead dead real Jeanne, with her blonde hair and misery and her strong arm knocking down all devices. There was a part of Kat that would track the scatter of cogs outward from impact. It was not a part she listened to. She really hated Diego, and, she told herself, some things were too ugly to connect back to your work. No matter if every acquaintance, every chance encounter, fell prey to the mind’s scavenger predilections; it was all right to extract a design from a bird, but that was different from taking notes on the courting gifts of a _stalker._ She had a thousand other descendants of Diego’s stuff to interview, if that was what she wanted. He’d been a genius. His robots were beautiful. She wasn’t denying any of that.

(And in her dreams, the green line of the arrow—at last a toy that reached Jeanne's heart. Glowing, unbroken, between balding-white ribs, like the leg of an insect amid hobbyist teeth.)

So, she was making Roboyote, to go down into the canyon Coyote had carved. She was helping. But even she didn’t know what to make of the black outer membrane, thick and glossy as a coat of crude oil, which conferred a recognizable silhouette on Roboyote at last; she woke up one morning to find that she’d nodded off by the big trinocular microscope, and her creation had sprouted a pelt. At first she was terrified that she’d messed up the settings on the suspension gel—could the color be the result of tissue oxidation?—but further investigation proved that all underlying systems were intact. If anything, the appearance of the external sheath solved a problem she hadn’t yet resigned herself to, that of finding a “hide” material that could withstand Roboyote’s shape-changing capabilities. But where, how, when, what—

"It’s Coyote!" Annie said, all frank astonishment. "Kat, did you learn to sculpt _dark chocolate?_ ”

Even when her confection confusion had been cleared up for good, she insisted that the picture needed to be completed with blue and red highlights. Kat let her handle the add-ons, once she was satisfied that paint and the black stuff were compatible; she was still in shock from its spontaneous generation, and didn’t really have the mental energy to resist. The finished product looked more like a bruise than a shiny racecar, but Kat wasn’t about to tell Annie that she hadn’t quite nailed the stripes. Coyote’s markings were always in flux, anyhow. If you thought too long about his insides, you could trick yourself into thinking he was an animal of surfaces, uninterested in his organ groups but careful of his skin. But the truth was, there was nothing about Coyote he wasn’t prepared to invert or pass on. Ysengrin and Renard were proof of that, supposedly. Power over trees, power over new bodies… at least, Kat was pretty sure Annie had said that him giving out powers meant giving them up.

She stroked the notochord with a latex-gloved hand. Roboyote, running on the faintest of currents, nevertheless arched to the touch.

*

She asked Robot about the case of the darkness in the night-time, because he’d broken into her lab before and once stolen the remains of a wing. He looked at her with spring-green LEDs and said, “You don’t remember?”

"I—uh. Sorry? What should I remember?"

Robot extended a fingerless hand to point at Shadow, curled silently on the bench at his side. Kat stared. Out of the sleeve of Shadow’s hoodie, there poked a suggestion of black feathers; she had never seen that trick before.

"The angel came," Robot said. His LEDS, his eyes, bright as the arrow left high on the bank. He touched his friend. "The angel took."


End file.
